With mulish determination to ignore parental wisdom, teens set off on soggy adventure
Now that some friends and I are nailing down the final details for a big hike we have coming up, I’m starting to get questions from people I mention it to.
Why, they want to know, would anyone willingly spend days and days walking through wilderness when there are so many civilized, comfortable ways to spend a vacation?
I usually have some highbrow answer about soaking up the grandeur of unsullied creation, but lately I’ve been recalling a very different motivation for one memorable backwoods trek: muleheadedness, demonstrated by dumb obstinacy brought even lower by contempt for a loving mother’s worry.
In my defense, I took this particular trip with some buddies not long after we graduated from high school, and immediately after the loving mother in question explained why changed circumstances had made it foolish to stick with our plan. As teenagers who felt newly set free in the world away from the shepherding gaze of parents or teachers, we took an adult waving us off our path as challenge, not protection.
We had tossed our full backpacks and a tent into one guy’s pickup and were getting ready to drive off to a remote trailhead in the mountains when the driver’s mom approached to tell us about those changed circumstances. Although it felt like a fine day, a big rainstorm was heading for those mountains.
We shouldn’t try to hike through the storm, my friend’s mom said, assuming that we were sensible enough to see her wisdom, drop our plans and maybe go see what was on the shelf at Blockbuster instead. But she made a crucial error that’s common among the parents of kids on the cusp of adulthood. She forgot that our brains hadn’t quite gelled into those of sensible adults.
Finding the limits of what you can do on your own is one of the highest priorities at that age. So as soon as an adult suggested that we might not be up for the challenge before us, we started digging in our heels.
The whole thing was firmly settled as soon as my friend’s mom said she’d stay up waiting for us that night if we were still going to try to make the trip happen. She assured us that she knew we weren’t really as dumb as we sounded, so she would have dry beds ready when we saw for ourselves how miserable that night in the mountains was going to be and turned back for home.
Well, we were as dumb as we sounded.
A little dumber, actually. As the storm pounded our campsite several muddy miles away from the pickup, someone mentioned that he’d been taught to never touch the inside of a tent when it was raining because it would make water leak through. Naturally, each of us immediately touched a spot over someone else’s head, and we all rolled over to try to sleep through our own personal rain-shower. Evidently, simply remembering an adult had suggested that something would be foolish was enough to spur us into action.
Maybe we were much dumber than we sounded.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that wet, miserable weekend in the mountains in the past few weeks since my older son earned his driver’s license and the freedom to use it.
It turns out that teenage me who lacked sense enough to come in out of the rain somehow managed to pass an important lesson through the decades to middle-age me: When I know my kid should drop an ill-considered plan that’s not bad enough for an official parent veto, laying a trail of logic that he can follow himself is better than giving clear advice.
An outright “Whoa!” just sends a stubborn mule galloping down the bad path he has his eye on.
Richard Espinoza is a former editor of the Johnson County Neighborhood News. You can reach him at respinozakc@yahoo.com. And follow him on Twitter at @respinozakc.